Making Sense of Big Textual Data for Health Care: Findings from the Section on Clinical Natural Language Processing

Abstract

SummaryObjectives: To summarize recent research and present a selection of the best papers published in 2016 in the field of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Method: A survey of the literature was performed by the two section editors of the IMIA Yearbook NLP section. Bibliographic databases were searched for papers with a focus on NLP efforts applied to clinical texts or aimed at a clinical outcome. Papers were automatically ranked and then manually reviewed based on titles and abstracts. A shortlist of candidate best papers was first selected by the section editors before being peer-reviewed by independent external reviewers. Results: The five clinical NLP best papers provide a contribution that ranges from emerging original foundational methods to transitioning solid established research results to a practical clinical setting. They offer a framework for abbreviation disambiguation and coreference resolution, a classification method to identify clinically useful sentences, an analysis of counseling conversations to improve support to patients with mental disorder and grounding of gradable adjectives. Conclusions: Clinical NLP continued to thrive in 2016, with an increasing number of contributions towards applications compared to fundamental methods. Fundamental work addresses increasingly complex problems such as lexical semantics, coreference resolution, and discourse analysis. Research results translate into freely available tools, mainly for English.

Spontaneously generated online patient experience data - how and why is it being used in health research: an umbrella scoping review

“… ADR Mainly online forums +Twitter/blogs Scoping 24 Lau 2019 [ 52 ] Artificial Intelligence in Health: New Opportunities, Challenges, and Practical Implications To summarise the state of the art during the year 2018 in consumer health informatics Any Any SM General review 14 Lopez-Castroman 2019 [ 53 ] Mining social networks to improve suicide prevention: A scoping review Narrative review of possible suicidal behaviours on social networks Mental health NS Scoping NS Mavragani 2020 [ 54 ] Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Scoping Review The aim of this paper is to provide a scoping review of the state-of-the-art in infodemiology along with the background and history of the concept, to identify sources and health categories and topics, to elaborate on the validity of the employed methods, and to discuss the gaps identified in current research. Any Mostly Twitter Scoping 338 Neveol 2017 [ 55 ] Making Sense of Big Textual Data for Health Care: Findings from the Section on Clinical Natural Language Processing To identify the best clinical NLP papers of 2016 Any SM + EHRs General review 5 Neveol 2018 [ 21 ] Expanding the Diversity of Texts and Applications: Findings from the Section on Clinical Natural Language Processing of the International Medical Informatics Association Yearbook Summarize recent research / best papers for clinical NLP in 2017 Any Any SM General review 15 Patel 2015 [ 56 ] Social Media Use in Chronic Disease: A Systematic Review and Novel Taxonomy To evaluate clinical outcomes from applications of contemporary social media in chronic disease; to develop a conceptual taxonomy to categorize, summarize, and then analyse the current evidence base; and to suggest a framework for future studies on this topic Chronic Any SM Systematic 42 Pourebrahim 2020 [ 57 ] Adverse Drug Reaction Detection Using Data Mining Techniques: A Review Article The aim of this study is to study, review and c...…”

“…In terms of the methodology of the included reviews, almost half (27/58), were described as systematic, with 15/58 being general, 12/58 scoping, with one each of narrative, critical, survey and bibliometric. The number of studies in the included reviews ranged from 5 [ 55 , 65 ] to 3419 [ 73 ], with an average of 118.…”

“…One review focused entirely on looking at the potential of blogs as a qualitative data source [ 69 ]. Six (10%) reviews used both SGOPE and electronic health records (EHRs) [ 30 , 32 , 44 , 55 , 66 , 70 ] while Abbe [ 23 ] used a combination of online posts, EHR’s, biomedical literature and qualitative studies.…”

“… NS Combine SM data with traditional sources for more complete assessment. Neveol 2017 [ 55 ] Best clinical NLP papers of 2016 Any Applications of NLP, Directions of progress Developing applications rather than methods. Starting on the more complex tasks e.g., semantics, coreference resolution, and discourse analysis.…”

Hierarchical neural model with attention mechanisms for the classification of social media text related to mental health

“…This includes not only routinely collected data such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but also patient-generated text or speech. Patientgenerated content has been made available by social media, mainly in the form of tweets or forum posts (Névéol and Zweigenbaum, 2017;Gonzalez-Hernandez et al, 2017).…”